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Blinkx: Over 18 million hours of video. Search it all

Sun, 11 May 2008 11:21:42 GMT

clipped by: Silkweaver

blinkx is the world’s largest and most advanced video search engine.

blinkx has built a reputation as the Remote Control for the Video Web. Now, with an index of over 18 million hours of searchable video and more than 200 media partnerships, including national broadcasters, commercial media giants, and private video libraries, it has cemented its position as the premier destination for online TV.

blinkx pioneered video search on the Internet, developing an engine based on technology that was conceived at Cambridge University, enhanced by $150M in R&D over 12 years, and is now protected by 111 patents.

Unlike other multimedia search engines that attempt to re-purpose technology built for the Text Web, blinkx uses a unique combination of patented conceptual search, speech recognition and video analysis software to efficiently, automatically and accurately find and qualify online video.

All of this content is now available to viewers around the world

Tags: web tv

Surprising Discovery: Multicellular Response Is 'All For One'

Sun, 11 May 2008 11:00:45 GMT

clipped by: Silkweaver

Clip Source: www.sciencedaily.com

ScienceDaily (May 10, 2008) — Real or perceived threats can trigger the well-known "fight or flight response" in humans and other animals. Adrenaline flows, and the stressed individual's heart pumps faster, the muscles work harder, the brain sharpens and non-essential systems shut down. The whole organism responds in concert in order to survive.

At the molecular level, it has been widely assumed that, in single-celled organisms, each cell perceives its environment -- and responds to stress conditions -- individually, each on its own to protect itself. Likewise, it had been thought that cells in multicellular organisms respond the same way, but a new study by scientists at Northwestern University reports otherwise.

researchers demonstrated something very unexpected in their studies of the worm C. elegans: Authority is taken away from individual cells and given to two specialized neurons to sense temperature stress and organize an integrated molecular response for the entire organism.

Tags: biology, organism behavior

Once shunned by academics, Wikipedia now a teaching tool

Sun, 11 May 2008 10:51:28 GMT

clipped by: Silkweaver

Clip Source: www.physorg.com

Wikipedia, the upstart Internet encyclopedia that most universities forbid students to use, has suddenly become a teaching tool for professors.

Recently, university teachers have swapped student term papers for assignments to write entries for the free online encyclopedia.

"The vast majority of Wikipedia entries aren't very good," said Beasley-Murray, but said the site aims to be academically sound.

To reach its goal of academic standards, said Wikipedia's web site, it set up an assessment scale on its English-language site. The best encyclopedia entries are ranked as "Featured Articles," and run each day on the home page at http://www.wikipedia.com.

Of more than 10 million articles in 253 languages, only about 2,000 have reached "Featured Article" status, it said.

In May, three entries created by nine students in the course became the first student works to reach Wikipedia's top rank.

Tags: wikipedia, web

Quantum computers take step toward practicality

Sun, 11 May 2008 10:46:42 GMT

clipped by: Silkweaver
clipper's remarks: In computing, a logic gate is built to accept a set of inputs and, depending on their properties, provide a specific output. In the binary logic found in today's electrical computers, a certain gate will yield a "1" only if all of its inputs are "1"s. Otherwise it will yield a "0." Similarly, a quantum photonic gate would work by detecting the properties of input photons from two light beams, called "control" and "signal," and then producing an output based on those, such as by flipping the polarization of one of the input photons.

Clip Source: www.physorg.com

Computers based on the powerful properties of quantum mechanics have the potential to revolutionize information technology and security, but for decades they have remained more theoretical than practical, and difficult to scale up. That is changing, however, as demonstrated in a report this week in the journal Science.

In the paper, engineers and physicists from Stanford and the University of California at Santa Barbara demonstrate a potential progenitor of an essential component of quantum computers, "a logic gate" that enables interaction between just two particles of light.

The key advance is a solid state device that can reliably produce an interaction between the light particles, called photons.

"We have demonstrated a system composed of a single quantum dot in a cavity that can be used to realize such a gate, and we demonstrated that two photons can be made to interact with each other via this system,"

Logic from light

Tags: physics, quantum computing